your own meaning? My dear friends, the Author of this Book lives, and is near, every hour and in every place, to every one of us. Go to Him, and say, "Oh! send out thy light and thy truth, let them lead me;" and in that clearest light of God you will see all things clear.

This is the true secret of the various interpretations of sacred writthat so many read it in any light but in the true light;" and the difference between reading God's book in the light of God's Spirit, and in any other light is immense. Were you to go forth and look upon one of the lovely landscapes of our father-land, when the moon at midnight shone upon it in her calm and silver beauty; you might, indeed, comprehend the general outline of the scene, but you could not distinguish flowers, and plants, and colouring. A misty haze would dim the whole panorama. But if you went forth to contemplate it at noonday, you could discern the tint of every flower, the nature of every tree, trace the meandering of every stream, and the whole landscape in its length and breadth would be presented, with a beauty and a perspicuity you were unconscious of before. So with the Bible. Read it in the misty moonlight of the fathers, and it is very inexplicable indeed; read it under the mistier star-light of the Church, and it is more unintelligible still; but in the exercise of chastened and sanctified judgments, bring the sacred page beneath the beams of the Sun of Righteousness, implore the presence of the Holy Spirit, and instantly it is flooded with a glory, that makes each perplexity plain, every difficulty vanish, and each text instinct with life, simplicity and beauty.

It was the rule of faith held by the Roman Catholic divines, and by the Oxford Tractarians, that plunged Europe in all the murky darkness of the middle ages; and it was the Protestant rule of faith rescued from their grasp, that folded within itself all the blessings, civil and religious, which Britons now enjoy. The moment Luther brought the Bible, the Protestant rule of faith, from its prison-house, the Augean stable began to be swept, the idols fell from their niches like Dagon before the Ark of the Lord, the trumpet of another Jubilee sounded through the length and breadth of Christendom, filling men's hearts with the enthusiasm of truth, and waking all Europe with the thunders of long dormant and oppressed Christianity. It is owing to the noble efforts of the Reformers of the sixteenth century, under the blessing of God, that we are what and where we are. They planted the tree of life in the midst of our native land; they watered it with the tears of weeping eyes, and with the blood of warm hearts; and all the reward they coveted on earth was, that we, their children, and their children's children, might sit down beneath its shadow, and eat its fruit, so pleasant to our taste, whilst their ashes moulder at its root, and their happy spirits look down from their seats, and rejoice that "they laboured, and we have entered into their labours.”

What was it, that brought wreck upon Jerusalem, and extirpation on all its grandeur? They preferred the traditions of man to the commandments of God; and from the moment they began to do so, corruption revelled at the core, and spread forth its contagion to the utmost circumference of the Jewish race. Let it be a warning to us in the present day. The Jews had ecclesiastical authority, outward sanctity, a succession most legitimate, a gorgeous ritual, the law and

the promises, and alms-givings and fastings, such as the Eremites and Clenobites of Oxford have never attempted to rival; their whole economy was instituted amidst stupendous miracles, and cradled amid glorious mercies; they had prophets commissioned from heaven to guide and teach them; they had a temple, the glory and the admiration of the whole earth; but in an evil and disastrous hour, they preferred the traditions of man to the commandments of God, and from that moment they felt and proved the great truth, that the Church which would steal a ray from the glory of God, takes a consuming curse into its own bosom. They began to waste and decay; and when the Son of God came to Jerusalem, how did they receive him? They who boasted of being "the temple of the Lord," the only Church, the occupants of Moses' chair, exclaimed-" Away with him, away with him ;" and at last the Son of God was condemned to be crucified between two thieves, by a people that declared themselves the children of Abraham, and the chosen of the Most High. What consuming and crushing judgments followed! Thirty years afterwards, the Roman armies concentrated around foredoomed, because guilty, Jerusalem; the firebrands soon blazed amid the carved work of the sanctuary; the shouts of the Roman soldiery were heard in those cloisters where the accents of prayer and thanksgiving had been uttered by venerable priests and prostrate auditories; the Roman eagle spread its wings where the cherubim were; and Josephus, a spared priest, sat amid the ruins of his father-land, the weeping chronicler of its faded glories. Every stone that now remains cries out in dumb, but awful eloquence, Ichabod! Ichabod! the glory is departed! My people have committed two great evils: they forsook the fountain of living waters, and hewed out to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that could hold no water."

My dear friends, if you wish to arrest a more dreadful and precipitate decay; if you would stem, under God, the tide and torrent of superstition, that now threatens to inundate the land of our fathers; if you would support the great principles you love, and disperse the overshadowing heresies you hate; cleave more closely to your Bibles, clasp to your hearts your Bibles, read and study and comprehend your Bibles. The Bible, taught you by the Holy Ghost, is your bulwark and your glory. If God, in judgment, were to take the stars from the firmament, the tides from the ocean, the verdure from the green earth, he would not inflict, by half, so tremendous a catastrophe, as to permit the removal of his book from its supremacy, and to suffer the traditions and commandments of men to occupy its place. To the Bible we are indebted for our brightest hopes, for our most substantial peace, for our deep and holy faith, for the knowledge of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. It alone, of all the monitors of our universe, teaches me that I am not an orphan; trumpet-tongued, and with the solemnity of a judge, and the certainty of a prophet, it declares that eternity is the measure of my lifetime, infinity the boundary of my home, and God, " even our own God," my portion.

I have great faith in the promises of God, and in the inborn grandeur of real Christianity. Its ministers may be made martyrs, its true-hearted oues may be sorely tried and persecuted, but a seed shall be left in the worst proscription to serve their God. Crushed

they may be for a season, but conquer they eventually must. Should Popery, and its subordinate drudge, Tractarianism, rise to a still more gigantic and overshadowing influence, the sacred truths of the Gospel will not be extinguished; the persecuted Church will become purer and intenser, as her outward oppression accumulates, and speak forth a more free and faithful testimony. The most stirring notes of the trumpet of the everlasting Gospel have been uttered amid dreary glens and tangled deserts, and the brightest glory has arisen from the ashes of the martyrs. When the number of martyrs shall be the greatest, the holy splendours of the millennium will be the

nearest.

LECTURE VI.

THE INVOCATION OF SAINTS.

"Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve."- Matthew iv. 10.

You perceive, in the text I have now read in your hearing, an illustration of the statement which I adduced on a previous evening, that our blessed Lord repelled the temptation of Satan, not by an appeal to his own omniscience as God, but by an appeal "to the law, and to the testimony," as decisive on the declared duty of man, and on the revealed doctrines of truth. On three several occasions Satan plied him with temptation; and on each of those occasions, our Lord repelled him with the simple, but to us satisfactory, announcement"It is written." My text is one of these: "It is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.'

'But,' asks some one in this assembly, 'is it needful to address such a text to any section of Christendom whatever? It may be most appropriate amid the idolatrous isles of the Pacific, it may be a most important prescription to inculcate on some savage and unenlightened shores; but do you mean to say, that there is any portion of the professing visible Church, that needs to have it impressed upon its priests, or inculcated on its people-"Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve?""

My dear friends, there is a portion of the visible Church, that needs to have this inculcated. In the Church of Rome, I contend, that however subtle and delicate her theoretical distinctions on the worship of saints, the practical effect is, that Mary has assumed the place and prerogatives that belong to Christ; and that angels and spirits, who are, or are supposed to be, before the throne, are made to absorb, and to conciliate to themselves the adorations and the praises that ought to ascend, exclusive and undiluted, to our God and Father, through Jesus Christ, the only Mediator.

You are aware, that the announced title of this lecture is-The Invocation of Saints. Some Protestant may perhaps ask, what is meant by this? I will tell you. We believe, in common with the apostles, that all true Christians are saints; that every man whose heart is changed, is a saint; but Roman Catholics, on the other hand, call those who belong to her visible communion "the faithful," and 66 'saints are those who are canonised and beatified, and supposed to be in heaven before the throne, the objects of our invocation, and the intercessors between Christ and us, just as Christ is the intercessor between God and them. The Oxford Tractarians give the same restricted meaning. Perhaps there is a little Popery in our ordinary phraseology, for we speak of Saint Matthew, Saint Peter, Saint John, Saint Paul, as if they alone of all Christians were saints; whereas the humblest orphan, who is clothed in the glorious righteousness of Christ, and has "washed his robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb," is just as much entitled to all the glories of the celestial residence, as is the loftiest hierarch that stands near the throne, or the most illuminated evangelist, that ever brought the tidings of mercy and of peace to the lost and the ruined of the human family.

I have this evening to adduce strange and startling illustrations of

G

what I venture, faithfully, but affectionately, and duly comprehending the full force and meaning of the expression, to call the idolatry of the Church of Rome. In order to explain the subject to you more clearly, and to present authentic information, I will begin by reading to you the decisions of the creed of Pope Pius IV., and of the Council of Trent.

In the Creed of Pope Pius IV., it is said "I believe likewise, that the saints, reigning together with Christ, are to be honoured and invocated,"-honorandos et invocandos. And in the decree of the Council of Trent on the invocation and veneration of saints "The holy synod commands the bishops, and others, who have the office and care of instruction, that according to the custom of the Catholic and Apostolic Church, which has been received from the first ages of the Christian religion, the consent of the holy fathers and the decrees of the sacred councils, they make it a chief point," -to do what? to preach Christ and Him crucified? to beckon sinners to the Cross? no, but-"diligently to instruct the faithful concerning the intercession and the invocation of saints, the honour of relics, and the lawful use of images; teaching them, that the saints, reigning together with Christ, offer to God their prayers for men, and that it is good and useful to invoke them with supplications, and on account of the benefits obtained from God through his Son Jesus Christ our Lord (who alone is our Redeemer and Saviour,) to have recourse to the prayers, aid, and assistance of the saints; but that they who deny that the saints, enjoying eternal happiness in heaven, are to be invoked,-or who assert, either that they do not pray for men, or that the invoking them that they may pray for each of us, is idolatry, or that it is contrary to the honour of God and opposed to the honour of the one Mediator between God and man, or that it is folly either in word or thought to supplicate them,—are to be accursed."

The distinctions drawn by the Church of Rome are these: they say, that the supreme worship that is to be given to God is AarpeLa [latria]-a Greek word signifying worship; that the worship which is to be given to the virgin Mary is vrεpdovλea [hyper-doulia] a very lofty form of worship, but not so high as that given to God; and that the worship to be given to the saints in general, is deλea [doulia] -an inferior kind of worship.

The Roman Catholics, however, will deny that they worship the virgin Mary with the same worship as God; and I fully concede, that, in the canons of the Council of Trent, and in the Creed of Pope Pius IV., the distinction is clearly and definitely kept up. But what

I allege is, that in the books of a Church that professes to be infallible, and under the express sanction of illustrious Popes and distinguished Councils, a worship (as I shall now proceed to show) is given to the saints and to the virgin Mary, which can be characterised by no softer epithet, than that of absolute and fearful idolatry.

The first document which I shall produce, in order to make good my assertion, is one with which most Roman Catholics are perfectly familiar; it is called The glories of Mary. A strange expression, certainly, to a Protestant's ear; he can understand well the glories of Christ, but the glories of Mary is an expression, that seems to grate upon an ear, to which Christ has long been all, and Mary comparatively nothing.